Eight Lanes of high speed traffic on Auchentoroly Terrace separating neighbors from a world class park.
Baltimore City Department of Transportation is wrapping up a study for what should come next for Druid Park Lake Drive. We need you to comment now to ensure the future design prioritizes safe access for all road users and safe crossings into the park over maintaining a highway width road for speeding cars.
Here’s why:
The Big Jump Evaluation Report studied the city’s 2018 implementation of one lane in each direction for Druid Park Lake Drive, along with the creation of The Big Jump: a protected, ADA accessible pathway along Druid Park Lake Drive and 28th Street that allows people of all ages and abilities to walk, bike, and roll along the corridor for the first time since expressway construction in the 1940s.
The Big Jump created an ADA accessible crossing along 28th Street and Druid Park Lake Drive for the first time since expressway construction began in the 1940s.
Data shows The Big Jump increased usage of the corridor by people walking, biking, scooting, and using mobility devices. Reducing car travel lanes to one lane in each direction made crossing into the park easier, reduced crashes, had no major impact on traffic along the corridor, and did not push traffic onto adjacent neighborhood streets.
For some reason, despite this clear evidence of success, the city’s study for permanent implementation provides three options for the future:
One lane in each direction, the option that’s already proven through The Big Jump pilot and evaluation to work
A confusing hybrid concept with multiple lanes
A highway style design that basically keeps what is there, which we know does not work
The only reasonable option that will ensure a permanently safe and accessible corridor is permanently designing one lane in each direction.
Despite the evidence that one lane in each direction works, a vocal minority of people who live west of the corridor and drive on it oppose this option. In fact, they oppose all of the options, because they all keep some form of biking facility in the design. They don’t just want a highway, they want any safe access for bikes removed entirely.
These individuals have spent thousands of dollars papering neighborhoods along the corridor with flyers that state The Big Jump has caused major backups to traffic. We know through detailed traffic analysis that this is false.
They simultaneously claim that nobody uses The Big Jump, and that it is a gentrification project only used by wealthy white people. This is also false. We know through user analysis that 66% of bike and scooter riders and 70% of pedestrians using The Big Jump are Black. Half of these users have household incomes of less than $50,000, and 27% have household incomes of less than $20,000.
The history of this highway that plowed through communities and divided them from our city’s greatest park is explicitly racist, a design to both accelerate and accommodate white flight. It would be a travesty to maintain the status quo.
The only acceptable path forward, the only path that advances racial justice, equity, and prioritizes safe access and connectivity to Druid Hill Park is the option to return the corridor to its pre-highway design of one lane in each direction. It also has the benefit of a pilot project and data-driven evaluation proving it works.
We can’t let a few loud voices, concerned only about their car commutes, derail a visionary plan to reconnect our communities.